Editorial: Business gets a breather from Obamacare

Employers can rest easy for a bit longer following the July 2 announcement delaying the employer health care mandate within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act until 2015 as the act we had to pass to see what was inside begins to reveal its inability to rein in costs for America's of the more than $2 trillion a year health care industry.

"We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively," said Mark J. Mazur, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the Treasury Department, in a statement.

But while the move will benefit businesses, still recovering from the long recession, that were grappling with the complexity and cost of the act that was six months away from full implementation, many other key provisions remain in place and on schedule, including state health insurance exchanges and the mandate for individuals to have insurance or pay a penalty.

To be sure, our health insurance industry is in desperate need of reform. Premiums rose more than 50 percent from 2000-05, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the U.S. health care industry already accounts for 18 percent of the economy, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers. That is a greater GDP share than accounted for by the nationalized systems of Canada and Germany and places the United States at the top of OECD member countries for health expenditures.

But, it should be noted that many cost-inflating measures, like barring insurance companies from competing across state lines, mandating expensive coverage on basic health policies and tying coverage to employment are all the result of government interference and regulation, not in spite of it. Now, the law widely known as Obamacare does much to confound those issues.

Instead of offering affordable health care, as promised, the law will only mandate coverage for individuals not covered by a group plan or face a fine of $950 or 1 percent of their income, making those consumers captive to the existing health care oligopoly.

Plus, with the recent departure of UnitedHealth and Aetna from California's market for individual policies, in response to the impending Obamacare implementation, the law has left much of that market to three insurance companies already claiming about 87 percent of the state's individual policies.

And in California, seen by many as the model for Obamacare, implementation could cause those individual premiums to increase as much as a 146 percent, according to data released in May by the California health benefit exchange and reported by Forbes.

So while group policy-holders received something of a reprieve last week, individual policy-holders are still in for quite the sticker shock when January comes around. But then, maybe they will receive an exemption, too.

Instead of further piecemeal exemptions and delays to simplify implementation - or perhaps more favorable outcomes in the midterm elections – a better solution would be to delay the act indefinitely and allow all Americans to exempt themselves from the implementation of this coercive and cost-prohibitive system.

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